According to Thai government figures from mid s there are about , prostitutes in Thailand, with between 50, and 80, of them are under 18, and one percent of women in Thailand have been prostitutes at some point in their lives. In the early s, many of the non-Thai prostitutes were from the hill tribes in northern Thailand and Burma.
These days many girls are from southern China. Many of the Chinese girl service Chinese and Taiwanese men in Thailand on business or vacation. Prostitution is considered by some as an easy way to make money. If a village woman goes to work in a large city or resort when she was in her late teens and twenties and sends home reasonably large chunks of money and returns when she in her thirties with enough money to live comfortably it is at least implied that she worked s a prostitute while she was away from her village.
In the mids , the number of women in Bangkok estimated to be engaged in prostitution or in related services ranged from , to 1 million. Some observers noted that prostitution was firmly entrenched in modern Thailand as a result of historical, economic, and social factors. The majority of Bangkok prostitutes were rural migrants providing economic support to relatives back in the country, which was expected of Thai daughters within the extended stem family system.
In other words, Thai prostitutes were not fleeing from a family background or rural society that oppressed women in conventional ways but were engaging in an entrepreneurial move designed to sustain the family units of the rural economy, which had come under increasing pressure. Since these women usually did not reveal the source of their remittances back to the village, their families could retain or gain status based upon their earnings.
Only 1 percent of the women reported that they were younger than 16 years of age, and 11 percent reported starting working in commercial sex before the age of The national origin was Thai for 85 percent of the women, with 8 percent Burmese and 1 percent Chinese, and 6 percent from a northern hill tribe. Most of the women, 80 percent, were from rural areas, while 89 percent had moved directly from their village of origin to an urban area primarily to work as sex workers.
